The present invention relates generally to client/server multimedia applications and more specifically to generation and distribution of personalized multimedia natural-phenomenological information.
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice applies to the software and data as described below and in the drawings hereto: Copyright (copyright) 1999, Digital Cyclone Corporation, All Rights Reserved.
In recent years, natural-phenomenological information has become increasingly important. Natural-phenomenological data is collected almost instantaneously from numerous sources. For example, natural meteorological data is collected from a multitude of individual sites scattered across the world, such as airports, and hydrological data is collected from nearly all of the rivers in the United States. Consumer interest in natural-phenomenological information has also increased as a result of increased participation in outdoor activities and increasingly damaging natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.
Furthermore, systems for electronic distribution of natural-phenomenological information are commonly available today. Such conventional systems typically include a computer software program running on a client computer that displays periodically reported natural-phenomenological information provided by the National Weather Service through a direct telephone line dial up connection or an Internet connection. The natural-phenomenological information conventionally includes, past, present and forecast meteorological conditions for a number of specific geographic locations including meteorological measures of
temperature
relative humidity
wind direction and speed
barometric pressure
wind chill
dew point
precipitation activity
cloud coverage
satellite images
radar images
aviation-related information
warnings and watches of dangerous natural phenomena such as
floods
tornadoes
hurricanes
hail size
speed and direction of the movement of storm cells
wind gusts within storm cells
supercell type
avalanches
brush fires
and forecasts for the local geographic area and the geographic region. Natural-phenomenological information also includes tide cycles, hydrological measures of lakes and rivers, seismological reports and forecasts, and ski area snow condition reports, and cosmological events such as sunrise, sunset, and moon phases.
The software programs that display the information include, widely available browsers, platform independent applets, or custom-programmed graphical user interfaces. Server processes are implemented to support the distribution of information to client computers.
All of the above systems provide natural-phenomenological information regardless of the particular needs of the consumer. However, consumers of natural-phenomenological information typically are interested only in a portion of the large amount of natural-phenomenological information that is available. The process of filtering through the large amount of natural-phenomenological information in order to retrieve the specific information that the consumer is interested in and performing a manual qualitative analysis of the information is difficult and inefficient for the consumer. For example, leisure sailors may be primarily interested in wind and tide conditions and golfers may be primarily interested in precipitation and sun intensity. Non-commercial pilots may be particularly interested in conditions at altitudes that few others are interested in. Furthermore, people with particular health conditions may be primarily interested in ozone measurements and pollen count. In addition, skiers may be specifically interested in ski conditions and avalanche reports and campers may be only interested in brush fire reports. Other individuals may only be interested seismological information. Finally, people who work outdoors may be particularly interested in heat index and wind chill.
Prior art products fail to solve the problem of providing customized generation of natural-phenomenological data tailored to an individual. Therefore, there is a need for the generation and distribution of personalized multimedia natural-phenomenological information.
The above-mentioned shortcomings, disadvantages and problems are addressed by the present invention, which will be understood by reading and studying the following specification.
Natural-phenomenological information is personalized to the unique requirements of a subscriber and distributed to the subscriber. Personalized meteorological information is generated and distributed by receiving natural-phenomenological data from a source device, receiving predetermined criteria for selecting natural-phenomenological data is received, in which the predetermined criteria comprises information that describes at least one activity, a portion of the natural-phenomenological data based on the predetermined criteria is selected; and the portion is transmitted to destination device. The receiving of natural-phenomenological data can occur before, in parallel or after the receiving of predetermined criteria. In another aspect, the portion transmitted is encoded so that the portion is in compliance with the destination device medium capabilities, functions and features.
More specifically, natural-phenomenological data is gathered from a variety of sources, such as current ground observations, forecast conditions, satellite images, and radar data. Personal preferences of the subscribers are also gathered and stored, such as activities of the subscriber, geographic locations of the activities, sensitivities of the subscriber to natural phenomena, calendar information of the subscriber, and modes of delivery. The personal preferences of the subscriber are used as a filter to identify the natural-phenomenological data that is particularly useful to the subscriber, and the resulting information is delivered to the subscriber. The subscriber identifies the destination device that the information is delivered to. The invention is extensible to support new sources of natural-phenomenological information and new output devices. Electronic delivery of the personalized natural-phenomenological information can be through any number of a variety of output mediums, including pagers, text to voice synthesizers to create an audio stream for playback either via a telephone or a personal digital assistant (PDA), a multimedia-enabled computer, email, computer display monitors, PDA, and a PCS phone.
The present invention has the advantage relieving the subscriber of the task of using less efficient methods of gathering natural-phenomenological information that addresses the specific needs of each individual subscriber.
The present invention also has the advantage of delivering the natural-phenomenological information in a manner that is in compliance with, and makes use of the capabilities, functions and features of the device and communication mediums of the subscriber.
The present invention describes systems, clients, servers, methods, and computer-readable media of varying scope. In addition to the aspects and advantages of the present invention described in this summary, further aspects and advantages of the invention will become apparent by reference to the drawings and by reading the detailed description that follows.